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Tribeca Film Festival's Immersive Offering Is First Class

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As one of the first festivals to champion VR as a compelling form of storytelling, this year’s immersive offerings at Tribeca Film Festival will not disappoint.

The Virtual Arcade, presented by AT&T, and the Tribeca Cinema360, are two events which come under the Tribeca Immersive banner. Visitors to the Virtual Arcade encounter a lineup of 22 dynamic VR, AR and MR experiences and exhibits from new and established artists, while the Tribeca Cinema360 features 12 curated screenings in a custom VR theater.

“Tribeca Immersive remains committed to the power of new technology as a dynamic vehicle for storytelling,” said Loren Hammonds, Senior Programmer, Film & Immersive for Tribeca Film Festival. “This year’s programming spans a myriad of genres, including many world premiere VR, MR and AR experiences.”

I’ve picked out a few experiences below. A full list of what’s on offer at Tribeca can be found here.

Bonfire - Baobab Studios

Baobab Studios - a VR animation studio that is a veteran of the Tribeca Film Festival - makes you the lead actor in this interactive experience.  

As Space Scout 817, you are on a mission to discover a new home for the human race after it has made a mess of Earth. You crash-land on an unknown planet 300 light years from Earth. With a makeshift bonfire as your only light source and a robot sidekick (voiced by comedian and actress Ali Wong), you come into contact with the strange inhabitants and decide how you want to interact with them.

Bonfire is the studio's "most aggressive foray into interactivity yet”, Boabab CEO Maureen Fan says. Baobab has pushed the technical limits with its real-time rendering, artificial intelligence and interactive narrative systems.

Festival attendees can also participate in a Facebook Augmented Reality experience using camera filter effects that will transform viewers into the Bonfire character Pork Bun. Additionally, in partnership with MixCast and Powered by HP, attendees can create and share their festival experience with friends by using the Mixed Reality video systems that merge real world and virtual world footage together.

Baobab Studios

CAVE - Parallux

CAVE is a social VR experience, created by Parallux. The coming-of-age tale is set 12,000 years in the past - when campfire stories and cave drawings were all the rage. The piece is designed from the ground up to challenge the status quo around how audiences collectively experience immersive arts and entertainment.

"Most VR right now is frustratingly isolating and inaccessible to the public," Kris Layng, chief creative officer at Parallux told Wired. "We developed CAVE to demonstrate how VR can scale up to the kinds of mass audiences we're familiar with seeing attend cinema and theater. The result is an experience that feels exhilarating, natural, and powerfully social.”

During the experience, when a member of the audience looks left or right, they see virtual representations of the people sitting either side of them. Each avatar follows the movements of the person it represents, turning its head in the same direction and ‘looking’ wherever he or she does. Sebastian Herscher, CEO of Parallux explains further: “On top of that, every seat has a unique viewpoint, like a theater,” Herscher says. “So the person on the left side of the audience is having a very different experience and a different viewpoint than a person on the right side of the audience.”

CAVE was produced in partnership with the NYU Future Reality Lab and sponsored by the likes of Google, Lenovo, Bose, and NVIDIA.

Parallux

Into the Light - Jessica Brillhart / Vrai

Jessica Brillhart’s Tribeca project, Into the Light, is an immersive audio installation that pipes Yo-Yo Ma's rendition of Bach's "Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor" through multiple floors of Tribeca's Spring Studios location. The experience was created with Brillhart's audio platform, Traverse. Currently, Traverse requires Bose AR glasses, but soon the app should be usable with standard headphones, and also compatible with Android devices (currently the app is only compatible with iPhones). Traverse was launched at SXSW earlier this year.

It has been, says Brillhart, "very frustrating" to show work that people can’t experience outside of a festival environment. "When I built Traverse, I was like 'It has to be for the home,'" she says. "We have to build it from the ground up to be something that anybody can use.”

Vrai Pictures

Traitor - Lucy Hammond, Pilot Theatre

Traitor is a two-player VR escape-room thriller created by Pilot Theatre. In the experience, you are tasked with finding teenager, Emma McCoy, who has vanished. The audience is ushered into an incident room, where they are met by Commander Harris, who explains that McCoy, one of the youngest research operatives at the Digital Espionage Division, has disappeared. There are no active leads, and the clock is ticking. All the team has is an unregistered VR game discovered on a memory stick in McCoy’s backpack. As time counts down, one player works at a control desk, the other in VR to uncover evidence under the mounting pressure from Commander Harris. Working as a pair, you’ll crack codes, track phone calls, and uncover clues to Emma’s whereabouts, but nothing is quite what you expect.

Creator, Lucy Hammond, says: “Traitor relies on constant communication between the two players. The story explores what it means to be a digital citizen today."

The VR experience was inspired by an interactive theatre show, Pilot Theatre, created with Teatret Vart in 2017. Then, Pilot Theatre was given the opportunity to develop the story in VR through funding from the Creative XR programme with Arts Council England. Traitor makes its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade as part of its Storyscapes competition.

Traitor mixes live participants, VR and puzzles.

Pilot Theatre

The Key  - Celine Tricart, Gloria Bradbury

The Key is a 15-minute room-scale VR experience with a strong narrative, punctuated by moments of choice. The interactive journey takes users into a dark and mysterious dreamworld, introducing them to Anna, a young woman who finds herself unable to remember her past, despite her vivid dreams. Through exploring the virtual world, you find clues which help Anna uncover her past and decipher the meaning behind the key she dreams about.

Lucid Dreams Productions director Celine Tricart and producer Gloria Bradbury partnered with the Oculus VR for Good Creators Lab on the project.

Celine Tricart says: "As a lucid dreamer myself, I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams. In The Key, I want to take the participants into a magical realism journey through different dreams, where each detail has a metaphoric meaning. It's a multi-sensory experience where colors and music carry the narrative. Through this journey, a hidden truth is uncovered and a new beauty revealed."

“I’ve studied hundreds of interactive VR projects, trying to understand what works and doesn’t work for story-driven experiences. I learned two things that I decided to use in The Key. First, simplicity is key. Instead of using all the buttons on the controllers for tasks or teleporting, I decided to craft the environments so that the participant doesn’t have to. In order to interact with objects or characters, touching them is enough. That way, even non-gamers can easily understand the experience mechanics and enjoy them without having technicalities getting in the way.”

Oculus VR for Good

Tribeca Immersive, located at the Festival Hub inside Spring Studios, runs until 4th May. Don't miss it if you are in New York! Tickets can be purchased online at tribecafilm.com/immersive